Significant Digits For Thursday, May 12, 2016

Welcome to Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.

6

Number of times Lhakpa Sherpa has climbed to the summit of Mount Everest, the most of any woman on Earth. She’s now working on her seventh summit, but has remained somewhat anonymous despite her achievements. [Outside Online]

9-5

Vladimir Putin played a pickup game of hockey against some amateurs and basically wiped the ice with them: His team — which, sure, may have had a few former players on it — won 9-5. (What I would give to hear Putin’s attempts at chirping.) The big story of the game, though, is that Putin totally ate it at one point and a photographer got a picture of his fall into The Guardian. [The Guardian]

24 speeches

With 22 commencements addresses in the bank and two more to come this year at Rutgers University and the Air Force Academy, that’s the total number of graduation speeches President Obama will have given while in office. Obama’s rate of three speeches per year is about par for presidents since the speech-heavy years of George H.W. Bush, who gave 23 commencement addresses in just four years as president! [FiveThirtyEight]

518 votes

Number of votes obtained by the presidential ticket of the Prohibition Party in the 2012 election, down from 270,000 votes in the halcyon days of 1892. This year, the party hopes to get on the ballot in six states, up from just one state in 2012. [The Guardian]

5.75 million

Number of job openings in the U.S. in March, about 30,000 short of the monthly all-time high. [CNN]

$50 million

Estimated annual revenue of the Cabbage Patch toy line, one of the original juggernauts of the toy business. The brand is at the center of lawsuits between Jakks Pacific Inc., which used to have the marketing license for the toys, and Wicked Cool Toys, a company formed by former Jakks executives and the current holder of the license. There is blood in the cabbage patch. [Bloomberg]

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